Luck-Based Mission: Difference between revisions

* A number of combat-oriented shooter missions - such as in ''Men of Valor'' and ''[[Call of Duty]]'' (or thereabouts) - where you have to run through an artillery barrage to a foxhole or somewhere to get to the next stage, and it's up to chance whether you go down or not while running.

* In H.P. Lovecraft-based FPS ''[[Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth]]'', the fourth mission has the player riding in the back of a pickup truck while the driver navigates the streets of Innsmouth. As firearms are extremely inaccurate (and you're shooting at things that don't take that much damage from them), there's very little point in shooting back, and if the game decides that the swarms of inhuman monsters taking potshots at you are accurate enough to overwhelm your first aid supplies, you're going to be doing the level over. And over and over and over...

* On ''[[Medal of Honor]]: Allied Assault'''s Hard (read [[Harder Than Hard]]) difficulty setting, many levels are practically impossible to pass without [[Save Scumming]], particularly where there are randomly [[Respawning Enemies]], and with [[The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard|the computer being a cheating bastard]]. For example, Omaha Beach, where even if you flawlessly dodge the machine guns, you'll still get randomly killed by artillery shells. And Sniper Town, with its randomly-placed hitscan snipers. Earning some of the medals is also luck based, particularly the Sniper's Last Stand and Storming Fort Schmerzen levels, where a certain number of [[Red Shirt]] comrades must survive.

* The first boss of ''[[Descent]]'', between the boss's random [[Teleport Spam|teleport spams]] and [[Macross Missile Massacre|Macross missile massacres]], and the population of [[Demonic Spiders]] (Super Hulks and Class 1 Drillers) in its lair. Especially if you're trying to save the hostages on Insane skill. In fact, many of the levels are this on Insane due to the [[Roaming Enemy|random roaming nature]] of many enemies.

 

=== Puzzle Game ===

* Perhaps this is not the experience all players will have, but ''[[Reset Generation]]'' feels as though the entire game is built around luck and coincidence. If the right items drop in the right place, it's easy for anyone to completely wipe out the other players. Much of the time there seems to be very little strategy required at all; if a particularly useful item drops into your territory and you're able to defend it from being destroyed by cannon shots (an easy task), your opponents won't stand much of a chance... Unless an equally useful item falls into THEIR possession.

** Plumber is actually a very [[Game Breaker|broken]] [[Character Select Forcing]] in this regard. Items are usually the difference between victory and defeat, and his power allows him to fetch nearby items without actually walking to them, basically giving him weighted dice as far as item drops go. Basically, he's the High Priest to the [[Random Number God]]. It certainly doesn't help that he can grab a full-power-charge item, taking away his opponent's chance to grab it, and then grab another one as he pleases.

* The underrated game ''[[Constructor]]'', upon reaching certain stages in house construction, would make certain demands of you to build X number of houses/facilities on one estate with X features. However, it also imposes varying arbitrary quotas on how many houses of each type you're permitted to build. If, upon reaching the penultimate stage in the game, it asks you to build the wrong type of house, the quota will forbid you from building enough and you'll be sacked (Read: Taken out of your headquarters in a coffin while you're sleeping and buried alive). You can't [[Save Scumming|save scum]] your way out of this one, it's determined when you start the game. If you're unlucky it will have been impossible to win regardless of what they'd have asked for, and you're screwed. Say goodbye to the last 4 hours...

* ''[[Europa Universalis]] III'' lets the player play ANY nation that is implemented into the game and existed historically during the time period. This includes historical strategy gaming mainstays like France, England and the Netherlands, but also tiny minor nations like the Irish kingdoms of Leinster and Connaught. Playing one of the Irish minor nations basically depends on little other than whether England will want to annex all of Ireland early on, and whether England gets into enough trouble with the French, Scottish and Burgundy.

* ''[[League of Legends]]''. It is similar to ''[[Defense of the Ancients|DotA]]'', which means it is a 5v5 real-time tactics game. It is not designed to have significant random elements. However, if you do not bring a full premade team of 5 people, the automatic matchmaking system will roll the dice - and god knows who you will get as your teammates. They may end up being terrible players while the enemy team may well consist of a perfect composition of the five best champions at their respective roles playing together like clockwork, pushing straight to your base and stopping only to fling a quick 'gg noobs I ***ed your mom' at your head. If this happens, there is absolutely nothing you can do no matter how skilled you are: you lose.

* [[Dark Reign]] has several:

** In mission 5, as the Imperium, you have to destroy a Freedom Guard base while preventing them from destroying the Water Extraction Compound, located in their base. They attack it when you breach their defenses, so you have to be ready to charge in and destroy everything quickly. However, you have no way of knowing what they've got in the way of units, so you have to pray they don't have half an army ready to destroy it.

 

=== Role-Playing Game ===

** ''[[Final Fantasy I]]'' had Necromancers, ''[[Final Fantasy II]]'' Cockatrices. If a group of them got to strike you first (which is completely random), and you didn't equip an item to protect your party from debuffs (which you usually get late in the game, short of [[Sequence Breaking]]) ...Poof! The whole party gets [[One-Hit Kill|killed]] or turned to stone (which is pretty much the same) without even getting the chance to fight back or attempt to escape.

** The ''[[Dragon Quest]]'' series takes this idea to a new level, especially in ''[[Dragon Quest VIII]]''. Pretty much ''every'' attack every random encounter has is remarkably powerful. On the other hand, almost all of them (even the most badass bosses) have certain moves in their repertoire that more or less boil down to staring off into space and wasting a turn. The fact that they're stupidly powerful when they hit you with their best shot but sometimes don't hit you with any shot at all is supposed to balance out in the end, but of course, this is random....

*** This is because the games give almost every legendary a catch rate of 3. This means that, at most (using the most appropriate Poke Balls for the situation, getting them to a sliver of health, and putting them to sleep), you have about an 18% chance of bagging them.

*** Or, even worse, "Will the game decided that I've caught the legendary before it Struggles itself to [[Never Say "Die"|unconsciousness]]?" Basically, if you drag out the battle with a legendary long enough, it will use up all its moves and resort to "Struggle" a technique that inflicts damage on both you and the legendary, hence meaning a half hour of tossing ultra balls (or stronger ones, like Timer or Dusk Balls) just went down the drain because the legendary just made itself faint. Beldum also falls into this category; it also has the ridiculously low catch rate, but it's trying to take itself out from the word go...its only attack is the recoil-inducing Take Down.

** And on the topic of Pokémon, Battle Revolution has a few luck-based coliseums. In the first, you have a roulette wheel to determine whether you get to use one of your own pokemon, or one of your opponent's far less useful ones. In the second, it's a 100-battle endurance match, where the roulette is used to determine if any of your pokemon get healed.

*** Not to mention that the 100 battle match has fog on most of its stages, which makes all pokemon's accuracy drop. Sure it's totally fair, as it affects both sides, but over 100 battles, the probability approaches 100% that you will eventually be horribly screwed while the computer is unaffected.

* Look The Other Way, a luck-based minigame found in the [[Minigame Zone]] of [[Super Mario RPG]], gives you exactly a 50/50 chance of winning, and the prize is randomly chosen and nearly always junk. However, you have a very small chance of winning powerful items like the party-healing Kerokerocolas, invincibility-granting Red Essences, and the game's real prize, the Star Egg, which deals 100 damage to all enemies and can be used unlimited times for no cost (fortunately, the Egg itself is always given out with the 100th win, so getting it is only as random as winning 100 times is). Playing the minigame is fortunately free, but expect to spend a very long time playing it if you want to nab that Egg.

* In ''[[The World Ends With You]]'', on the 5th day of The Game, a Reaper asks you to bring him a 'Supply Factor' pin to access a particular store. Even on Hard, with your level set low enough to let you fight the Noise that drop these pins, it is dependent on a) Letting the Noise spawn in-battle, and b) rolling a low chance of these pins dropping.

* ''[[Icewind Dale]] 2'' proper was somewhat about this, featuring some bosses who use "x% chance your party all dies" spells, but the tactics mod is absolutely brutal. The dragon in the snake/amazon level is immune to all hold spells (as in, anything that would render him immobile), all death spells, it has 300 hp, resistance to every type of damage. Oh, and he has 99 damage attacks 4 times a round while every so often hitting your party with ~100 damage AoE acid attacks. Mind you this is when your party's tank has a grand total of, at maximum, 250 hitpoints. The only way to beat him is to hope your pre-placed delayed blast fireballs and skull traps take out enough of his hitpoints to let your tank take him out in 2-3 rounds or else its all over. Did I mention his attacks also stun and he constantly casts fear? The myriad ways you can be fucked over beyond recovery each round with a single throw of the dice make it the pinnacle of luck-based mission.

* The 8-bit computer game tie-in to the film ''[[Willow]]'' was ill-conceived, badly executed and features a blatant example of this. Remember the part in the film where the eponymous Willow releases Madmartigan from his prison cage? In the game, you have two blank cages: one random cage contains Madmartigan, the other contains Death (yours). Heads you proceed, tails you lose a life.

* A scary number of battles in ''[[The Last Remnant]]'' can turn into this, due to the fact that the AI [[Random Number God|randomly]] [[AI Roulette|assigns]] what each union is allowed to do at the start of each turn. Including heal. This can result in a unit getting beaten down to critical HP and starting the turn without the sensible option of trying to heal their HP, usually resulting in them getting wiped and usually a game over.

* Getting your [[Only Mostly Dead]] [[Player Character]] resurrected in ''[[Infinite Undiscovery]]''. Since you can't give orders while dead and there is a very short time window before getting a [[Game Over]], it's entirely up to luck whether your friends' [[Artificial Stupidity]] manages to fit reviving you into their busy schedule fast enough.

* ''[[Cla Dun]]'' 's Rangeon (random dungeon) has the monster level, item drop rate and chance of items having rare titles change based on the type of gate you enter at the end of each floor. Regular Gates have little to no effect on these three variables. Angel Gates never raise the monster level by more than 1 and never lower the drop rate or rare title rate. Demon Gates and Hell Gates are guaranteed to raise the monster level, and lower the drop rate and rare title rate, with Hell Gates having more severe effects. Gamble Gates can go either way. There's always at least one gate at the end of each floor of the dungeon, but it's random which gate or gates are there, as well as whether or not there's an exit portal. All the gates' effects become greater as you reach deeper floors of the dungeon, and at the point where an Angel Gate is able to raise the drop rate and rare title rate by 40 or 50 each, a single Hell Gate can ramp up the monster level by '''hundreds'''. Even though your characters can only be level 99 at the max, enemies aren't subject to that level cap, and a Hell Gate late enough can pit you against level 300-400 monsters, leaving you no option except to run for the exit...if there is one.

* Minor example in [[Mass Effect 2]] on Insanity difficulty. At one point during Archangel, you need to close a couple of doors. However, enemies are running at the doors and if one reaches the threshold, the door reopens and you have to start again. If you do not have the right class and weapon or power combination, it is entirely possible for an enemy Krogan to run all the wall to the door without dying no matter what you throw at it. Basically, the only way you can win this mission in a lot of cases is if the Krogan AI randomly decides to stumble or doesn't spawn until it is too late to reach the door before it closes.

** Perhaps not so much luck based as [[The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard]], but one side-mission involving the collecting of a line of dropped items became near impossible after a certain point in the game when the Mafia becomes aggressive to you. The mission takes you right through their primary neighborhood and they blow you up near instantly with their shotguns.

** Rampages in ''[[Grand Theft Auto III]]'' (and its sequel, Vice City) typically require the player to destroy a certain number of gang members/vehicles within a time limit. These are ''very luck'' based as targets appear at random. Also, since vehicles and pedestrians often only spawn in the area when the player isn't looking their way, these rampages often have players frantically maneuvering the camera around, willing more targets to appear.

* ''[[Grand Theft Auto IV]]'' features a number of missions requiring the player to evade the police. This requires the player to escape a large circle of coverage where the cops are looking, if a cop car is nearby the cops will see you and the circle will re-center. This leads to a situation where the player must escape the circle while praying that a cop car won't spawn right next to them, making all that work escaping the circle completely void. Either that, or they must escape into the Pay and Spray, hoping a cop car doesn't spawn there, as the Pay and Spray won't work if a cop sees you go in.

** Or go into the subway, where cops can never spawn, and drive away uncontested. Though missions never require you to evade very high wanted levels to begin with. By the time the scripted part of the mission is over the wanted level always drops to 2-3 stars when you need to escape, even if it was higher at first.

 

=== Tabletop [[RPG]]s ===

 

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